What’s up, 2018? Here’s the features planning!

First of all, I want to wish you a Happy New Year! All the best for you and your family, your friends and your 3D printers!

Also, thank you so much for your trust during the past 1 year and a half! Printoid is growing crazy and that’s amazing. More and more 3D printers are now controlled by Printoid all over the world. Wow! That’s such a great pleasure to see that ❤

2018 is a new year with lots of promise. That’s why, like one year ago, I want to expose you my roadmap for the beginning of this new year.

New features

“Screen-saver” like page: I want to simplify the way to show the most important informations when a print job is running on your printer. That mean, I’m working on a way to display only the video streaming(s) and the remaining time, elapsed time, etc. on a beautiful screen. Texts will be of course bigger than the one on the actual main interface. Why? Because I see that more and more users are embedding Printoid directly on there 3D printers. And the main interface of Printoid is made for an advanced control, all-in-one style. Not good to display the main informations about the running job. Don’t worry, my goal is not to replace the actual interface by another one. But to find an elegant way to switch between the control interface (current home page) and a “job progress” interface.

Security settings: A lot of users want to protect their OctoPrint server and their Raspberry Pi, when opened to the Internet. I understand that security is important, so Printoid will soon support client certificates for the connection to your server.

Thingiverse API integration: May some of you have noticed that Thingiverse provides API for third-party apps. I want to start a partnership with this amazing “things base” and provide a direct integration of Thingiverse in Printoid. That mean, a new page to search things directly from Printoid, with of course a “upload to OctoPrint” button 😉 Useful for those who are slicing their files directly from OctoPrint.

Text-to-speech: Printoid will be able to talk to you (or to your dog or your cat if you’re not at home). That could be fun if Printoid said “Hey Peter, that’s ended! You can now take your brand new thing and start another print if needed!”

Improvements

Onboarding pages: I’ve noticed that a lot of users are a bit lost when they try Printoid for the first time. What’s the LAN IP? What’s the WAN IP? Why should I set a port value? What does “baudrate” means? Yes I have put a lot of links to the tutorials on Printoid.net, but I think that the users need to be accompanied by Printoid and not the website when they create their first OctoPrint profile in the app. So I will integrate a “step-by-step” tool to fill the OctoPrint profile, with explanations of each requested (and optional) parameters.

Statistics pluginsupport: Printoid is able to display you some statistics from the file manager. How much time did you print a file, or failed to print another object. How many files in this folder, how much filament this group of files will spent… But not advanced statistics about your printer habits, like the Printer Statistics plugin does. I’ll retrieve these informations and integrate them in an elegant brand new page in Printoid 😉

Commands panel enhancements: One of the major exclusive feature of Printoid is its custom commands panel. You have an access to the real time terminal, which is showing you the commands sent to your printer in real time. You can send your own GCODE commands to your printer and save them, send custom SSH commands to your Raspberry Pi, send custom HTTP commands, and call the OctoPrint system commands you’ve created in config.yaml. That’s cool, but… that probably too much in the same panel. Or a bit hard to understand, and not so ergonomic. I will do a huge refactor of this screen.